Introduction.There are various forms of fake science, bad science, and perverted science. History has seen many come, and decline, but none ever seem to die. The ideas of flat earth, hollow earth, astrology, alchemy and perpetual motion have supporters even today. These are interesting examples of the human ability to hold to an idea even without supportive evidence, and even in the face of contrary evidence. They, however, pose little threat to science, which simply ignores them and goes about its work.A newer pseudoscience arose, first called "creationism" or "creation science", which tried to impose the literal interpretation of Biblical accounts into science, and into the schools. This movement had considerable public support amongst fundamentalist Christians. Scientists generally ignored it as irrelevant to their work. In recent years a movement called "intelligent design" (ID) has been promoted by a handful of people who write books aimed at non-scientists. These authors claim that intelligent design is not a religious idea, but the public speeches of some of them reveal that their goal is to get "God back into science and into school classrooms". Creationists, having largely failed in their efforts, lend their support to intelligent design, as perhaps the best they can get—for now.Creationism and intelligent design are not the same. Creationism arose from clearly religious motivations. For political reasons, its advocates found they could "sell" it better to non-fundamentalists if they downplayed the religious content and renamed it "creation-science". But its essential content and goals were the same. Most creationists held that the earth was no more than about 10,000 years old, that the fossil record was laid down during the Genesis flood, and that natural laws were vastly different before mankind's "fall" in the Garden of Eden. To further their campaign to get some of this into schools, the Biblical content was stripped away even more, and what was left was primarily an attack on evolution. Evolution of all kinds, whether cosmic or biological, is anathema to creationists. Intelligent design strips away even more of the religious context, concentrating on the notion of an "intelligent designer" who supposedly created the universe, and perhaps intervenes in natural processes from time to time to create new species of plants and animals. ID claims that the evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer is found in the universe itself, and specifically in instances where natural laws "could not possibly" have brought about certain biological modifications through natural processes alone. Unlike creationism, intelligent design does not insist on an absurdly short age of the earth. Scientists recognize that the so-called ID "theory" is not a scientific theory at all, and that its claims of supportive evidence from nature are contrived and easily shown to be invalid. But scientists now also realize they must not ignore this threat to scientific integrity, for it is part of an organized campaign with social and political goals and widespread grass roots support.More details can be found in the bibliography below. With so many good books and websites refuting creationism and ID, you may wonder why I take the time to write these web documents. I felt there was a need to reduce the intelligent design argument to its bare bones, to strip away irrelevant issues, and show that the whole idea is not science, but is a counterfeit of science—a pseudoscience. Too many critics of ID have fallen into the trap of addressing each and all of the claims that ID advocates use to support their arguments. Someone should do this, of course, but the downside is that it suggests to the general public that the ID claims are a serious challenge to science. They are not. Most of the "scientific" claims of ID are simply irrelevant, for the fatal flaws of ID are much more fundamental. The elaborate arguments of ID only serve to hide the fact that the intelligent design hypothesis is completely devoid of scientific content. Intelligent design is a philosophical assertion without the slightest logical or scientific support.